The Dark Side of the Third Sector: Where no one can hear you scream!

The profile that’s so often presented by the media of the Third Sector is one of well-intended and dedicated
individuals striving to make the world a better place and whilst this is, on the who le, true there is a darker side to
the Third Sector, one which the Sector itself is adept at keeping, and would prefer to keep, under wraps; the
absolutely appallingly atrocious and tragically unprofessional behaviour of vociferous individuals who seem to
proliferate in the Sector and who undermine both the motivation and morale of the people employed in the sector
and also the management of the sector's organisations and agencies.

I came across this after I’d gone to work for a charity whose primary focus was the improvement and funding of
educational opportunities in Southern Africa called the Canon Collins Educational Trust for Southern Africa. At
the time the Chief Executive there, Ethel DeKeyser, was cantankerous to an extreme (she was openly referred to
in speeches by Cheryl the South African High Commissioner, as ‘a battle axe’) the first and last time I fell afoul of
her was after discovering that she had refused to pay for the renewal of anti-virus software for four years after a
dozen viruses got onto the system on one night there and wiped a database of 46,000 donors. Always the penny
pincher, and there’s nothing wrong with that to a degree, she responded that they would do things the old
fashioned way with pencil and paper. ‘Not with 46,000 records’ I responded. At lunchtime she stormed into the
very open office, planted herself in front of my desk and in a loud voice said, “How dare you fucking well try to
sabotage my charity that I’ve spent years building!”. Shocked to the core at her behaviour I waited until the
evening and after the office had emptied went to speak to her (she insisted that she was always available if
anyone wanted a chat). I went over what had been said and then insisted that, “When you speak to me kindly do
so with the minimum of professional courtesy or not at all”, at which she rocked back in her chair, rocked forward
and smashed her clenched fists down on her desk scattering files and folders all over the floor. “How dare you
speak to me like that! I’ve been a professional for 30 years!”. “So have I”, I said, “But I’ve never ever had to
behave like that”. The next morning she pathetically pettily extended my probationary period from 3 months to 6
months so I quit.

Unfortunately, as I was to find out subsequently I was going from the frying pan into the fire. I went to work for the
Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) which no longer exists. Things went well for a while until it was decided
to form a Secretariat with the deployment of a woman Director from the then Department of Trade and Industry.
Then the ‘fun’ began with the Director of Communications commenting to me while I was fixing her PC that 'Huh,
men, they're like computers. You can't live with them but you can't live without them!', and with the Director of the
Secretariat Lakhbir talking openly in the office about her wet dreams about George Clooney. Seemingly following
her lead other members of the Secretariat (and I was the only man in an office staffed by women) began to make
highly inappropriate comments. Bear in mind that if this had been an office staffed by men and I had been the
only woman I would have been quite justified in claiming inappropriate sexist behaviour, and this in the London
office of the EOC whose whole function was to fight gender inequality and sexism! The CEO’s PA started to talk
about how her boyfriend’s, and I quote, ‘erect cock’ dressed to one side when he was asleep. Then one day after
having read an article in a magazine about the World Ironing Championships in which a male Commissioner at
the EOC had been competing I passed the magazine to Sharon, the Chair’s PA. With two journalists sitting in the
open part of the office where the Secretariat operated she remarked in a loud voice, about the male
Commissioner, “That’s not a man. If he were my boyfriend I’d kick him out of bed and go and find a REAL man!”.
Well, when I started making some noise about the situation, quelle surprise, the Director of the Secretariat
started bullying me and managing me out of my job by so I found another job and left. An episode I refer to as
‘Sexism in the Secretariat’. The Chair's PA later commented that 'if it hadn't been for the fact that he is the only
bloke in an office full of women' - yes, that was exactly the point!

On what seemed a roll of experiencing really shoddy behaviour I later found a job working for a charity funded by
the EU called Ensuring Positive Futures looking at ways of helping long term unemployed people with long term
illness back into employment. To my surprise everything went well until the charity went bust. Then the ‘fun’
began again. The Executive sold off the equipment at the office (I bought a PC and insisted on a receipt so I had
hard evidence) before, I realised, receivers got hold of it. The server which held the client database disappeared.
It also surfaced that the Deputy CEO who, unbeknownst to anyone was an undischarged bankrupt, also had joint
responsibility for managing the charity's finances and had directed the member of staff responsible for
transferring salaries into bank accounts to redirect his salary to a bank account in Spain so that he could avoid
the bankruptcy reparation payments ordered by the Court, something for which he later served 6 months in
prison. The Chair of the Trustees, an ex-Policeman, Bernard, went on a smear campaign against the CEO
Stephen, whose only fault, as far as I could make out had been poor financial management, going so far as to
mislead a journalist with Private Eye into joining the smear campaign. After enlisting the journalist the Chair came
round asking the staff to undermine the CEO when they were contacted by the journalist. Not wanting to be a
part of what I saw as a personal vendetta I created an e mail address under an assumed name and emailed the
journalist with what I felt was a more factual account of what was happening. Alongside this the Chair and the
Board of Trustees refused to formally declare insolvency leaving a large group of former employees with no
recourse to the Government’s Redundancy Scheme; where a company doesn’t have the resources to pay
redundancies the Govt. scheme pays a minimal payment. One former colleague came very close to being made
homeless as a direct result of the actions of the Chair and the Board of Trustees. After three months extremely
hard work pulling all the evidence together a group Industrial Tribunal action was launched against the Chair and
the Board of Trustees who, on receiving the documentation, relented and formerly declared the charity insolvent.
I was subsequently interviewed by the Police about the goings on at the charity. When, at the time, we
complained to the Charity Commission they didn't want to know.

As ever, and in spite of what had happened, I was nonetheless still engaged with the ideals of the Third Sector
so I went to work for a charity called RedR UK working in the Humanitarian Sector. This did not go well from the
start with completely unfounded accusations of laziness being made by the CEO Martin when I was working my
butt off trying to find a place for us to move office to, one employee threatening to ‘punch my lights out’, another
saying she ‘wanted to murder me’, being subject to four years of open ridicule in an open office by another Rose
known by some in the organisation as ‘Princess Poison’ until when confronted with the evidence (two years of
contemporaneous notes) she, like a typical bully, burst into tears and subsequently left. Being subjected to
regular loud hysterical tantrums over matters so trite as to be ridiculous whilst sat at my desk in an open office by
the Director of Learning, one of which was because decaffeinated tea bags had (at the request of the staff I might
add) been put in the kitchen (at the time I could see other members of staff laughing and smirking at their desks)
and, after he’d been promoted to Chief Operating Officer from Director of Finance, David from Didcott, calling me
‘fatty’ in an open office in front of other staff for two years. An active (supposedly) Liberal Politician, who
peppered his vitriolic remarks with comments so anyone in the office nearby could hear such as “It’s a good job
we’ve got iron girders otherwise the floor would have caved in’ (the office was on the first floor and I had been
laughing at a joke someone had made whilst sitting in my chair) and, pointing at a small sumo wrestler I had on
my desk saying, “That must be your brother”. After finally having had enough I challenged him about his
behaviour in a catch up and was subsequently subjected to a tantrum at my desk by the CEO who he’d obviously
gone to see after the said catch up. To top it all off the CEO exhibited (according to the same Chief Operating
Officer) ‘tourettish’ behaviour when on one occasion he talked openly on the telephone in the open office about
the drinking habits of a politician he’d met the previous evening, and regularly walked out into the open office
pulling stupid faces almost each time as I left the office with him saying in a very loud imbecilic voice for all to
hear “BYE TREVOR, SEE YOU TREVOR!” all because as I left the office I said goodbye to anyone who was
there is much the same way, as I’d been told by David, that the RedR Staff in Africa do who I was trying to
emulate because, I suspected, he had a problem with me saying goodbye like that as I was leaving and that I left
the office around 4 even though I started at 6 in the morning working from home before going in to the office. And
this charity had People in Aid status! I was also astonished when after I handed my notice in after 6 years of
putting up with these sort of shenanigans I was asked by the same CEO to remember the charity should I ever
strike it rich. And this charity has People in Aid status! From my experience I came to the conclusion that there is
no Humanitarianism in the Humanitarian sector. The Chair of the Board commenting sarcastically and
condescendingly to the COO as we entered the building and a course was being run on Worker Effectiveness
that it should be a statutory training course for the rest of the staff – nice...

These examples are just the tip of my iceberg and I still have the contemporaneous records I made at the time.
One of the few examples that came to light in the public sphere was the sacking of three members of staff and
the resignation of three others from Oxfam’s Operations in Haiti for bullying and abuse of power, and another
that’s not well known in the public sphere was told to me by workers at a charity set up by a charismatic ex TV
personality whose behaviour, I was informed, towards the charity’s employees was venomous, bullying and
inappropriate.

What’s to be made of all this? It reinforces the issue of very poor management in the UK, some of the worst I’ve
ever seen where people in managerial positions seem to equate their position with some sort of pseudo class in
society. Well, for one, the Third Sector needs to clean its professional act up. The Charity Commission need to
set up a dedicated investigative unit and take complaints made by employees seriously. Organisations like
People in Aid need to actually talk to employees in confidence before making decisions on awarding certification,
and agency Staff Councils and the like need to be effective participants on the staffing-HR element of the
business processes of Third Sector agencies instead of being a nominal foil to Executive egos. In spite of this I’m
still engaged with the ethos of the Third Sector, perhaps naively so as in spite of the best efforts of some in the
sector to improve things it seems there will always be some who will actively go out of their way to undermine it.
Charismatic people who have an idea for a charity and then set it up should move on and, hopefully, leave it the
right professionals to run.